St Michael's, Great Oakley - Northamptonshire

United Kingdom

In early 2008, St Michael’s Great Oakley purchased a 1995 Peter Collins pipe instrument, which had started life as a house organ. Whilst the community at St Michael’s loved the organ, space constraints meant that the Pedal 16’ Subbass had to be removed to enable the instrument’s installation in the church. It is this bass ‘feel’ which gives support to congregational singing, and whilst some pedal tone was still available by transmission from the manuals, the lack of 16-foot made it less successful for congregational accompaniment.

Rodgers offers a number of solutions for this type of situation, and Peter Collins invited Rodgers UK, and their pipe organ partners MPOS Ltd., to come up with a simple way of providing the missing stop digitally.

Given the limited budget and the small number of digital stops required, it was decided to install a Rodgers MX-200 sound module, along with a custom-made MIDI scanning board designed and programmed by the MPOS team to interface with the organ’s tracker action. An amplifier and speakers are positioned discreetly within the organ case.

Developed by Rodgers and the Roland Group, the MX-200 is a 1,100-voice sound module designed to provide additional organ or orchestral voices to an existing pipe or digital instrument. At St Michael’s, in addition to the 16’ Subbass, it was decided to add three further Pedal stops from the MX-200, resulting in a much more comprehensive Pedal department. The digital stops have been voiced to blend perfectly with the pipework.

The installation was overseen by Paul Mortier and Mark Booth of MPOS Ltd. See http://www.rodgersinstruments.co.uk/installationGallery.htm for full case study and specification.